I often hear people say these days that “Christmas is not really my thing”. Or that they are not feeling particulary “Christmass-y” this year.
I get it.
And yet, to me the Holy Season is for everyone and is so often misunderstood.
In fact, it has the potential to be a transformative time of year if we can see it through a more Mystical lens. The true meaning of Christmas, the Winter Solstice, the Festival of lights, Hanukkah and the New Year to make it more accessible to ALL of us to experience an inner transformation no matter what our belief system.
It’s not only a time for Christians as many assume, because of the name or the famous nativity story created by St. Francis of Assisi in 1223 to encourage our devotion to a Jewish baby named Jeshua that we call Jesus, nor is it about the artificial decor of the holiday season, letters to Santa and parties. No matter how much we love the stockings, twinkling lights, baked goods and our trees filled with presents this is about MUCH much more that this ideallic “Alamy” image.
It’s about our relationship to light.
This mystical substance is not just a metaphor for grace, it’s how the visible world reveals itself to us.
The name Christos literally means light.
The quantum substance of all life. The trees, the oceans, the planets and ALL of us are made of this invisible light. We are made up of these photons of light and ancient societies in ALL traditions have created rituals and celebrations to help us return to the light.
This Holy season is an invitation for ALL life to focus on light at the darkest time of the year.
We may be a bit familiar with the power of understanding it from movies like “A Christmas Carol” or one of my faves… “The Grinch who stole Christmas”. The possibility of inner transformation from our internal realization of the light.
Our capacity to awaken to it is often called a miracle.
Scrooge is visited by three spirits who tell him that he COULD be a different person. They shine a light on his past and he has the realization in this archetypal journey available to all of us in all traditions. The Grinch’s heart grows three sizes when he understands the true meaning of Christmas.
“As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”
Carl Jung
The birth of the Christos or light in you is the new story of your life when you move from darkness to light. The winter solstice is a symbolic time for us to hibernate and get still then to infuse ourselves with this realization and begin to shift and heal from the inside out when we allow or invite the light in.
It’s a challenge for our egos to allow us to see or experience this light or have the realization that it’s in fact, what source or God is.
Our vocabulary is useless around this subject, but light is the substance of all that is.
It’s in everything alive and how life began.
We are dense expressions of it.
We breathe it in. When we see it physically even for a micro moment we say we are having a mystical or a spiritual experience. An awakening.
Saints and sages in every spiritual tradition are more light than matter. They can even levitate and heal others instantly. They radiate light and we draw orbs of light and halos around their head to point to this light. They can Bi-locate using this light. Walk on water. Transform water into wine. Raise the dead like Jesus demonstrated with Lazarus. There are no Lazarians walking around today, just Christians because Jesus showed us what is potential in us.
Our rational minds can’t even fathom any of it and our fear diminishes our capacity to experience this light for ourselves. It sounds like mystical madness to a rational mind, that is, until you HAVE this experience for yourself. To be infused with this light feels like the most incredible experience imaginable.
To be infused with this light feels like LOVE.
We all know what it feels like when this light begins to dim inside of us.
I sure do. Life feels hopeless and we are riddled with anxiety and fear. The monsters under our beds are real to us. We can feel depressed. Sad. Lost. Angry. When we lose it or dim our light with fear, jealousy, greed or gossip, and we judge others we depress our light. The darkness is a weight on us and we become more dense. Our level of consciousness is lowered. We feel unwell. Our life force is diminished with fear and we begin to reach outside ourselves for help. We just want to feel better. Drugs, alcohol, prescriptions, other people, experiences…anything to get out of that darkness.
Connecting with this light is potential in all of us but most of us will never get close to it, because our minds are closed to even learning about it.
If we did, we’d begin to see what we have already observed that in business, entertainment or politics the leaders that stand out are the ones that shine with this light.
They have enthusiam.
“Make of yourself a light.”
Buddha (said right before his death)
We are attracted to those who radiate or experience this light.
Cells that are infused with it are healthy and filled with healing life force.
I once heard a powerful saying that “sometimes we need a story more than food, in order to live”, and today I’d like to tell you one of those powerful stories from the 14th century that lives in my mind and animates my deep desire to forgive and love others exactly as they are.
It’s not about Christmas, but to me it helps explains the Christos or the beautiful story of light that carries a deeper unchangeable universal Truth about all of us.
This particular story was told to me by one of the wisest elders I know: the physician and professor Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen. It has helped me to shift how I see the world. She shared that it was a gift for her from her Grandfather when she was four years old.
While Dr. Remen was a medical doctor and grew up surrounded by doctors and nurses in what she calls a “scienc-y” or medicalized environment, it was shared with her by her beloved grandfather who was she lovingly described as “a flaming Mystic”. He was Rabbi and Kabbalah scholar. It’s a timeless story for all of us and in that sense, it’s never finished as long as we keep sharing it with each new generation.
I’ve taken the story from a 2005 transcript of an interview with Krista Tipett…
The Repairing of the World (Tikkun Olam)
Tikkun olam (Hebrew: תִּיקּוּן עוֹלָם, lit. 'repairing of the world') is a concept in Judaism, which refers to various forms of action intended to repair and improve the world. As it says in both the Quran and Talmud, if you save one life, it is as though you have saved all of humanity.
This is the story of the birthday of the world.
In the beginning, there was only the holy darkness, the “Ein Sof”, the source of life. And then, in the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light.
And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story, there was an accident. [laughs] And the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. And the wholeness of the world, the light of the world, was scattered into a thousand thousand fragments of light. And they fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day.
Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again, and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world. This is a very important story for our times, that we heal the world one heart at a time. And this task is called “tikkun olam,” in Hebrew — “restoring the world.”
And this is, of course, a collective task. It involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born — we are all healers of the world.
And that story opens a sense of possibility. It’s not about healing the world by making a huge difference. It’s about healing the world that touches you, that’s around you.
That’s where our true power is.
The interview helped me understand in a new way that while it sounds like an ideal dream to “heal the world”, what is being taught through the mystical lens in the Bible, in A Course In Miracles, in Islamic teachings, in Buddhism and quantum physics is that this light is IN us.
So why do so many people feel powerless?
Because we are disconnected from our inner light. We’ve forgotten who we are.
We know that from physics that we are actually made up of photons. The light is IN us and it’s our life force. It’s what sparkles behind our eyes and animates our bodies.
Ghandi called it our Soul Force.
It’s the Christos. Another word for light. The Christ consciousness.
And advent literally means our ARRIVAL at this realization.
To me, the GOOD news is that Christmas is not just a Christian story, or about a religion we invented, it’s about light. Jesus taught by demonstrating miracles and a new way of seeing ourselves in the world that had never dawned on us before the arrival of this Jewish Rabbi. Possibly only the second person (after Buddha 500 years before) to arrive on the scene to tell and show us that we are ALL the light of the world.
That the only way to “God” or the Father is through this christ consciousness or light that the very mystical gospel of John describes in detail. Jesus did not want us to worship him or start a religion in his name, or to war and judge other religions, but rather to embody this divine light and love one another.
We may have taken a very human long detour into fear, but the good news is that by deconstructing our old rigid belief systems and judgment, through forgiveness we can experience our highest human potential.
Enlightenment means understanding.
Jesus understood.
The last thing he did on earth was to forgive others and to me that pretty much says it all. Don’t get me wrong, I do love the Christmas story and religious traditions and carols, but that has been everywhere for centuries and does not always transform us at only the level of belief or doctrine.
This different way of looking at this Christmas holiday or our power and our true nature is this light and love might be something that can open us up to greater possibilities to see pas our recent heart break or work conflict.
To me, spiritual work is the most practical of all.
Jesus demonstrated this primordial light for us, for the first time in history what is potential in all of us. Fear and neurosis falls away.
“God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light.”
Genesis 1:3
A story like the birth of Jesus or Tikkun Olam, the birthday of the world demonstrates that we have inside of us a shared light hidden from plain sight that connects us all.
This light is our consciousness. It’s the unchanging eternal part of us.
We may think how can I make a difference, when I’m so wounded myself?
How can I make a difference, when I feel so not-enough?
We can because it’s our WOUNDS and the beautiful darkness that enable us to make a difference. As Dr. Remen describes - who at 15 was diagnosed with Crones disease and was told she would not see her 40th birthday and lived a life of pain and surgeries:
We are the right people, just as we are. For example, my own wounds, my own sufferings, have enabled me to feel compassion for the sufferings of others. Without my suffering, I wouldn’t understand the suffering of others or be able to connect to them. My loneliness enables me to recognize the loneliness in other people, even when it’s covered over; to find them where they have become lost in the dark, and sit with them; and to know that just by sitting with them, eventually they will find what they need in order to move forward.
This has been my own experience.
My suffering has helped me to experience this light firsthand in miraculous ways.
I’ve heard so many people say to me recently that they don’t really celebrate Christmas. I get it. They see what seems like an irrelevant Christian tradition about a man that was born 2023 years ago and corrupted by capitalism and a white bearded man in a red suit that gets all the credit around the world on Christmas morning.
They may be right, but if we look beyond the nativity scenes and the content or narratives of what happened historically and allow ourselves to be shown the context, it’s a GAME CHANGER for all of us through a slightly more mystical lens.
I adore the mystics because from this lens over any scripture it is not about a historical literal story, it’s about TODAY. Every bible parable is about YOU and ME in this present moment.
In this Field I know some of your reading have suffered a loss, have broken up with someone you considered to be “your person”, you’ve lost your job and are in the sometimes heart wrenching process of finding a new one. Some of you are having your first sober Christmas and a few of you are celebrating your first Christmas without a beloved parent. Some of your marriages are unstable, you are struggling with debilitating anxiety and depression. Some have had a recent diagnosis or are struggling to make ends meet. Many of you are experiencing a dark night or a time when it feels like the light has dimmed.
This season is for YOU. We heal our life force with this light. It’s pure physical, emotional, and spiritual genius. The highest intelligence that is operating INSIDE of all of us.
The light in you may feel like it’s dim but the good news is that it cannot be extinguished.
Christmas is a celebration of this light IN YOU no matter how dim things feel.
Hannukah in the Jewish tradition means DEDICATION. Hanukkah is about commemorating a miracle that occurred during the Maccabees’ rededication of the temple: The was how a jar of temple oil sufficient for only one day had sustained the temple’s eternal lamp for a full eight days, until additional ritually appropriate oil could be produced. It was a miracle and led to the tradition of lighting the menorah. The word menorah comes from a Semitic root meaning "to shine."
The contrast of light and dark always impacts me at this time of year.
The lights in our neighbourhood on our evening dog walks. The long dark nights in December. Interesting that families used to often slept together to keep safe from the avoid-at-all-costs darkness. We continue to avoid the darkness today with our prescriptions and night lights.
But what if the contrast of the darkness is what makes the light possible for us to experience?
It’s only when we’re far outside the city lights in the darkest darness that we can squint up into the night sky and gasp at the depth and beauty of the stars. To best watch the flames of the fireplace flicker and dance we turn out the lights.
We are born into the darkness of fear, judgement and violence on all corners of the planet, especially inside our own minds. Most of us want to be elsewhere, at some future imagined place when things will feel easier, be better. We’ll look different. We’ll have some different future experience of ourselves. To find a better way to be, live in a nicer place, to do all we can to avoid being here now.
In this perfect still moment to shine the light on it all and be with what is.
There is an inexhaustible source of light not only in Jesus as we are taught by the church, but what Jesus taught was that it was not just in HIM…it was in us as well.
We are made of that same light. Miracles are blasts of light. Light exists in dark holes in space. It’s mostly invisible to our eyes but spectrums so great that if all known spectrums were represented by the Empire State Building the light we can see with our human eyes would represent a grain of sand.
We are blind to our true nature.
We ARE quite literally made of Christos. The body of Christ.
This divine primordial light.
The light in the heavens that guided the magi is the star of light in the darkness of this world and showed us what was possible for all of us.
”Long lay the world in sin and error pining
Till he appear’d and the soul felt its worth.
Holy Night
Buddha had introduced us to it but until Jesus we were not fully aware or awakened to the fact that our interior world was our power centre.
Our spiritual intelligence. Our soul force.
Jesus came to ADVANCE our level of consciousness. In three short years he transformed Humanity. It’s hard to imagine that he died when he was 33 just a handful of years older than many of our own children.
That is what the light in us can do through us.
I think it’s why as much as I love “science” and it’s irrefutable “proof” to satiate our egos and intellects, it alone alone could never quite satisfy my soul. In my 50’s it has occurred to me that understanding physics or energy is not enough to inspire us to do what’s right, to get on our knees and bow in reverence or weep with gratitude. To pray, to forgive others that have hurt us and perform miracles.
To see the light in others. To serve.
After a personal awakening experience, this light is MUCH more personal than calling it a photon or studying it as a wave or a particle and how it behaves under intelligent observation.
Understanding the laws of light or gravity and cause and effect or how to meditate or be mindful to me is never going to be able to pack the same punch as experiencing this light for ourselves, having a spiritual awakening, a miraculous healing or even what it feels like to finally understand and embody an ancient proverb.
"The soul of man is God’s candle".
Or will help us feel what we do when we read a great poem like Daniel Landinsky's version of St. Thomas Aquinas' poem…
What Does Light Talk About?
When you recognize her beauty,
the eye applauds, the heart stands in an ovation,
and the tongue when she is near
is on its best behaviour,
it speaks more like light.
What does light talk about?
I asked a plant that once,
It said, "I am not sure,
but it makes me
grow."
I love that poem. I could go on and on about this light that we are…but I’m already well past my 9 minute marker for today and so let’s just allow ourselves to be invited to see that ADVENT is every day and for ALL of us to know that something is ON it’s way to us. In fact, it’s present and already here for us now. It’s a light that can’t be seen at first with our naked eye, or experienced until we make ourselves available to it.
“We only have to go a little beyond the frontier of sensible appearances in order to see the divine.”
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Let’s celebrate this light today and be reminded of it this holy season in every twinkling light we see.
This light that is present now in all of creation, the biodiversity of ALL living things. In the new planets being born that we recently discovered. For every tree being born today, for the whales and the dolphins, the night sky and coming to us in the consciousness of all creation.
In you. In me. In the dog or cat lying at our feet.
The light of possibility.
Our natural state that when we pay attention to it, lights us up from the inside out. The synchronicities, the guidance and learning what this light feels like in our ordinary life.
What would your life look like if you accepted that you ARE an expression of this light?
Light is not just a symbol or a metaphor. It’s an internal potential in us to awaken to.
It’s a living primordial substance. Before prophets like Buddha and Jesus walked the earth it NEVER even occurred to us that our internal world was a power centre that could advance us and elevate our consciousness.
The holiday season and advent is an invitation to happiness and love. To encounter our true nature which is a very very Merry thing.
It frees us from the prison of our ego and the neurosis of our psychology to realize that the light that created us and is connecting us is a boundless cosmic force for good.
When we shine our light on others we are loving them. Others feel it.
Let’s intend to be the shiniest person in the room.
Let’s get lit :)
With love,
Rev Nona
ps. Dr. Naomi Remen is now 85 years old. She has put this beautiful story in a book that might be the perfect gift for your children or grandchildren (ok, really for you:)
"But what if the contrast of the darkness is what makes the light possible for us to experience?"
I LOVE this question. We truly need both.